After the tremendous success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, it’s natural to ask if its real-time parrying system would be a good fit for your turn-based game. This article goes over the requirements and effects of doing so and why I chose not to add it to Hoop Dungeon.

Parrying

Parrying works by pressing the parry button when the attack animation makes impact with the character. If you parry all of the impact points, you then get to perform a counter-attack. Additionally, parrying provides extra action points for the next turn.

Clair Obscur adds a number of wrinkles to this; dodges, jumps, chromatic parries and attack boosts. However, I’m going to focus on the parries exclusively as it’s the best expression of the FADT. Additionally, I believe a consistent mechanic across these variations would have served the game well.

Requirements

  • Readable Animations - This should be understood as gameplay in itself. Much of Clair Obscur is in reading the animations for the impact moments. This gameplay is further developed by the game using fakeouts and changes of pace baked into the animations.
  • Plentiful Animations - As decoding animations is a key part of the gameplay and once decoded, an animation stays decoded, it’s necessary to have a lot of them for the player to solve. This is thus a content heavy feature.
  • Support for Shortcutting Difficulty - Parries and dodges are understood as damage negation not damage reduction. This binary attribute makes it so that mastering parries makes every battle winnable. As you balance the difficulty of the parries, you will find that some number of your players are able to beat the enemies trivially.

Effects

  • New Gameplay Vector - Reading animations is a key part of the gameplay of Clair Obscur and it’s pretty decent gameplay made better by the focus that the team put into designing challenge into reading the animations through fakeouts and pace changes.
  • Arbitrariness - A heavily handcrafted system will always have parts that feel arbitrary to a player and this was my largest source of frustration with Clair Obscur. I felt that I had the timing right and the game disagreed.
  • Attention to Animations - This forces the player to pay attention to the animations. When I played Final Fantasy Tactics, I did not pay attention to the attack animations as my attention had already shifted to the next thing as the animation played. The animations had no part to play in my calculations. This is also why I would have preferred an animation-reading system for attacks in Clair Obscur instead of QTEs. I was too busy looking for the QTEs to look at the animation.
  • Ease of Getting Good - This feature makes it very easy for players to get better at the game. Strategy games can often be obtuse and it can be unclear what you did wrong and how to get better. This feature provides a player with a straightforward avenue of improvement; learning the enemy attack patterns. I won all of the non-chromatic fights on the second try, including Renoir and the Paintress, just by getting better at parries. The effectiveness of this strategy has the secondary effect of overshadowing the turn-based strategy of the game. There’s little need to fully optimize your movesets and attack patterns when you can just parry better instead.

The most important effect of this feature however is that it made the combat of Clair Obscur unique. It stood out as something new and different in the space. As Clair Obscur is so successful, you will not get quite the same effect if you use it now, but instead get to have your game act as a reinforcing statement to Clair Obscur’s thesis. This can also be valuable for a game but would probably also benefit from a small wrinkle to make it a development and not an imitation.

Hoop Dungeon

As I’m currently working on Hoop Dungeon (a basketball turn-based-tactics game, available here), let me use it to demonstrate a theoretical integration of this FADT.

We’ll start by imagining two major integration points; shooting the ball and avoiding steals and interceptions. A naive integration would have the player perform a series of triggers proportional to the difficulty of the shot, dribble or pass. So, what is now a 25% shot could require the player to execute a series of three beats.

The first issue is that some players will just be able to execute the triggers trivially and so can take any shot and make any pass. This overwhelms both the tactics and the roguelike pillars of the game. A possible fix to that would be to have the triggers result in percentage boosts and penalties, but not determine success outright. So, hitting the triggers could result in a 25% shot becoming a 50% one. This is difficult to implement in a satisfying way as it can be deflating to hit your triggers and still end up in failure when the coin flip goes against you.

I don’t have a solution for this issue and I am concerned about taking the focus away from the tactics, so I’m not going to integrate this FADT but I hope you find it useful.